Scorched Earth

by Fred A. Wilcox

  Nguyen Thi Hong

  Trung Nam

  Que Trung, Queue Son, Quant Nam,

  Vietnam, July 21st 2004

  Dear Prof. Kenneth Herrmann,

  With reference to your article titled “Vietnamese AO victims need to say” in Labour newspaper, I write this letter to share our situation with you and your program.

  In the war from 1964 to 1975, my husband was a driver in the army. He was stationed at A Sau. A Luoi.

  We had had two normal children (one son, one daughter) before he joined in the South battlefield. However, after coming back from the war we had one more child in 1980. Unfortunately, she was abnormal. She’s only 13 kilos weight, keeps crying days and nights. I went to have her cured, but it was useless because the doctors all said that she was born mentally retarded. She was blind, paralyzed. She realized nothing about the world around her. I was so sad to know that dioxin from her father’s body had passed to hers causing her diseases.

  Now she is twenty-five years old, but she is only a child. She knows nothing except crying. I have to help her with everything in her daily activities. My family, therefore, meets with too many difficulties.

  As far as I am concerned, you and the “SUNY Brockport Vietnam” program want to aid AO victims. I write this letter with the hope that you will help us to partly compensate for the great losses that were caused by American troops in the war.

  Finally, I wish you and your colleagues health and success.

  Many thanks!

  Nguyen Thi Cam Bao

  102 D4 Vong Cau Giay, Ha Noi

  Dear Prof. Kenneth Herrmann

  My family are AO victims.

  My Professor, I am Nguyen Quynh Loc, born in 19(?). I joined army at the battlefield of the South in 1972. At 1977 I went North. After I had completed my mission, I came back and got married.

  We have three children. The eldest daughter is Nguyen Thi Huong Giang, born in 1988. She has a nervous disease.

  The second is a boy. Nguyen Minh Phu, born 1990. He has no arm.

  The last son is Nguyen Duc Tho, born in 1993. He has myasthenia, gets worse nutrition, has difficulty growing.

  I myself am a 4/4 wounded soldier. I have a wounded skull, and three spine joints were damaged. Seventy-five percent of my stomach was cut out. My liver, my spleen, kidney, and bladder were disabled and damaged because of the AO effects. Especially my second child Nguyen Minh Phu. He now is fourteen and studying in the sixth class level. He studies hard and well. But I am worried that he often has headaches, is dazzled. He sleeps all day. He has carbuncles everywhere in his body, especially on his feet and arms.

  We are very poor. My wife is weak, but she has to nourish her sick husband, disabled children. So we can’t live normally and the children can’t go to school. We have invited to Hanoi by the newspaper television station vTV5 to be on the “Family Maker” program. The children were taken care of by the government and leaders of organizations. Phu has attended the general congress of the Vietnam Red Cross, and AO Victims Fund.

  My family writes to you respectfully, my Director. Please compose a call to all humans for help. Our family needs your help very much.

  Minh Phu’s father

  Nguyen Quynh Loc

  Tam Hop Village,

  Tho Thanh, Yen Thanh,

  Nghe An Province

  One afternoon, Ken Herrmann visits a small home outside of Danang. Accompanied by Miss Hien, the chief of section social worker for the Danang Red Cross Chapter, and My Hoa, program administrator for the SUNY Brockport Study Abroad Program, he meets Nguyen Giao, the thirty-nine-year-old father of three girls, aged twenty, seventeen, and ten. Mr. Giao is lying upon a mat, unable to walk. His entire body is covered with tumors the size of golf balls. Large soccer ball sized tumors hang from his legs and chest. His skeletal arms and legs are bowed.

  When Mr. Giao was a child, his family lived less than one mile from a military base in Danang. Helicopters sprayed the area with something that killed all the fish. One day he ate potatoes that had been doused with Agent Orange. Before long, small tumors started growing on his torso, and within months or a few years, his friends had started to die. In 1980, tumors sprouted like massive mushrooms from his body, leaving him in constant pain, with terrible headaches and fevers. He’d been bedridden for the past ten years.

  Sometimes his wife buys painkillers to try to give Nguyen some relief from his pain, but the $3.04 he receives from the government doesn’t stretch very far. The family’s neighbors help them a little, and Mr. Giao’s wife grows rice and vegetables, cleans houses, and washes clothes to add to the family income. She worries about her husband and children.

  “He doesn’t eat much now. He often just lets his food sit in a bowl on the floor, but he can still feed himself if he wants to,” she tells her visitors.

  Nguyen’s daughters have also developed small tumors, and they suffer from fevers, headaches, dizziness, and vision problems. No one else in this family has ever had these kinds of conditions.

  “It all began with my eating a potato and drinking water that had been sprayed.”

  Asked what he would like to say to the Americans who caused his family’s illnesses, he pauses for a very long moment. Nguyen stares intensely at Herrmann.

  “I don’t blame Americans. I think it is my fate. If they can help my daughters I hope they will.”

  Miss Hien tells Herrmann that before they were exposed to Agent Orange, this family and thousands of others had no history of these strange illnesses. They’ve all been tested for exposure to dioxin, and tests indicate that they have been. They all lived in areas that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange.

  Herrmann opens another beer, removes his glasses, and watches great dark clouds roll in from Lake Erie.

  “The numbers of victims and the severity of their symptoms are staggering,” he says. “One family’s grandfather was VC and was sprayed. His son was born with tumors. His grandson was born with tumors. It is obvious that this legacy will haunt Vietnam for generations. One wonders why it does not haunt the conscience of America.”

  When Ken Herrmann boarded a “freedom bird” in 1969, he swore that he would never return to Vietnam. Certain that the plane wouldn’t be shot down, he cheered with other young men, now veterans, and settled in for a dinner of airplane food steak.

  “We were safe. We were going home. We had survived the hell known as the Vietnam War. Over time, I realized it was not the nation I had fled at all. It was the war. I had never left the nation at all. It had stayed with me.”

  Professor Herrmann’s staff and the students he asked to help out could not keep up with the avalanche of letters from all over Vietnam. If only these letters could be read on the floor of the US House of Representatives, to members of the British Parliament, to the French Assembly, to people throughout the world who would, if they just knew the circumstances, be willing to help victims of Agent Orange.

  Ken Herrmann is not the type to tell war stories. Ask him a question and he will answer, directly, not at all concerned whether you might appreciate his answer. Until I asked about his own exposure to Agent Orange, he didn’t mention the endless fixed-wing and helicopter spray missions over the Que Son and Hiep Duc valleys.

  “Yeah, they sprayed the valleys and they sprayed us. I had two heart attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, and suffer from ischemia, a heart disease, a recent addition to the VA’s list of related Agent Orange disorders. I filed a claim last week, and expect the VA to approve it whenever they get around to doing that.”

  After more than twenty-five years of waiting, American veterans are being compensated for a wide variety of illnesses related to their exposure to Agent Orange. This only happened because young soldiers who went off to the killing fields of Southeast Asia refused, years later, to give up trying to tell the world what Agent Orange/dioxin does to human beings. Vietnam veterans would not allow the government they served to ridicule their complaints as symptoms of drug abuse, alcoholism, or combat str
ess.

  Year after year, decade after decade, these veterans, their families, and their supporters attended meetings, started organizations, conducted research, created websites, wrote letters, and testified at local and national hearings, demanding that their government stop treating them as throwaway soldiers. There are no records of how many veterans have died premature, painful deaths, their cries for help drowned out by a chorus of stonewalling, denial, political chicanery, and scientific deceit. It’s impossible to know how many children have died in their mothers’ wombs or shortly after birth from monstrous birth defects. There were no ceremonies to honor these Agent Orange children. Grieving parents were not invited to the White House, nor were they asked to share their stories on national television and radio programs. Fathers and mothers laid their children to rest in lonely cemeteries, knowing these small caskets held victims of chemical warfare.

  It appears that at long last our nation has stopped blaming and trying to punish its own veterans for the catastrophe in Vietnam. Sadly, that is not the case when it comes to Vietnamese victims of the defoliation campaign. The fear of communism and the political expediency and hubris that drove the United States to wage scorched earth warfare in Vietnam have not given way to compassion for the survivors of that terrible destruction.

  In many ways, controversy over Agent Orange is like a mass murder case in which the presiding judge refuses to see the victims, even though he allows them to appear in court. Those who wish to hold the perpetrator(s) accountable are allowed to speak, even though their testimony will not influence the court’s decision. Asked to consider this most peculiar situation, the Supreme Court demurs. Why bother to hear arguments in a case when it’s already been established, time and again, that there are no verifiable victims?

  Scientists from many parts of the world have gone to Vietnam to ascertain the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people. Their findings indicate that dioxin poses a danger not only to those who were exposed to Agent Orange during and after the war, but quite possibly to future generations of Vietnamese children.

  Those who still doubt that our world is inundated with toxic chemicals and that these chemicals lodge in our bodies—undermining our immune systems, destroying our health, and killing our friends and families—might want to pay a visit to Vietnam. There, community workers, doctors, nurses, ex-soldiers, scientists, and others do not just talk about the dangers of carcinogenic, fetus deforming, and mutagenic chemicals; they show visitors what Agent Orange/dioxin has done, and is doing, to millions of human beings.

  Vietnam is the toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look. Inside of this mirror, we see polluted rivers and streams, dying lakes, poisoned oceans, and contaminated food and water. Inside of this mirror, we discover studies warning us that:

  At present, one-third of all Americans will develop cancer over a lifetime and one in four Americans are likely to die from cancer…. The proximate source of almost all dioxin intake in the general population is from food. Using our data for daily dietary dioxin exposure and the EPA’s proposed risk specific does, we estimate that over a lifetime a maximum of 30 to 300 excess cancers per million could result from the ingestion of dioxin-containing food products.1

  Inside of this mirror we find studies with titles like, “More Kids are Getting Brain Cancer. Why?”

  But evidence suggests the rise in these childhood cancers, as well as in cancers like non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma and multiple myeloma among adults, may also be partially explained by exposure to chemicals in the environment…. Recent epidemiologic studies have shown that as children’s exposures to home and garden pesticides increase, so does their risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, brain cancer, and leukemia. Yet right now, you can go to your hardware store and buy lawn pesticides, pain thinner and weed killers, all containing toxic chemicals linked to these diseases.

  In both children and adults, the incidence rate for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has increased thirty percent since 1950. The disease has been linked to industrial chemicals, chemicals found in agricultural, home, and garden pesticides, as well as dark hair dyes.2

  It’s easy to understand why we are reluctant to look into a mirror that displays the faces of our loved ones, friends, neighbors and colleagues who’ve died from cancer and other diseases linked to toxic chemicals like dioxin. We want to believe that no sane person would deliberately poison their own children’s air, water, and food supplies. Yes, something terrible might have happened in Vietnam; however, that was an accident. That was war. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and state and local laws protect citizens from a domestic form of chemical warfare.

  Skeptics, doubters, those who believe the Agent Orange tragedy is a communist conspiracy, and even representatives from corporations that profit from pain and suffering are invited to visit Friendship Village in Hanoi, the Peace Villages in Danang, and the children’s ward in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tu Du Hospital. The Vietnamese offer visitors bottled water, green tea, biscuits, and fresh fruit. They answer questions in a calm, polite, friendly manner, and they will take you on a tour of the legacies of chemical warfare. There’s no reason to fear the Vietnamese people. They will tell you about the toxic holocaust that befell their nation, then allow you to decide whether or not this tragedy happened.

  For decades, the United States government appeared to be waiting for Vietnam veterans to die. Now, the chemical companies and the government are waiting for the Vietnamese to give up their campaign to secure justice for the victims of chemical warfare. This will never happen. We ignore their suffering at our own peril.

  APPENDIX 1

  Selection from “Agent Orange” Product Liability Litigation: Memorandum, Order and Judgment

  LEGAL BASIS FOR CLAIMS

  a. Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”), US Code U.S.C. Title 28, § 1350;

  b. Torture Victim Protection Act (“TVPA”), 28 U.S.C. § 1350 note;

  c. War Crimes Act, USC Title 18, § 2441 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, 1925 Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Article 23, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed October 18, 1907;

  d. 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Biological Methods of Warfare;

  e. Article 23 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed October 18, 1907;

  f. Geneva Convention relative to Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, signed at Geneva on August 12, 1949;

  g. Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, signed and entered into force on August 8, 1945;

  h. United Nations Charter, signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945 and entered into force on October 24, 1945;

  i. United Nations General Assembly Resolution No. 2603-A (1969);

  j. Customary international law;

  k. Common law of the United States of America;

  l. Laws of Vietnam;

  m. Common law of the State of New York, including but not limited to product liability, assault and battery, negligence, recklessness, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment and public nuisance.

  Class certification is sought. In view of the dismissal of all individual claims, there is no reason to consider the motion for class certification.

  THEORIES

  a. War Crimes

  It is contended that the acts of defendants adversely affecting plaintiffs constitute violations of the laws and customs of war, also known as war crimes, which prohibit: the employment of poison or poisoned weapons or other weapons calculated to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering, the wanton destruction of
cities, towns, villages or the national environment, or devastation not justified by military necessity; the use of biological or chemical agents of warfare, whether gaseous, liquid, or solid, employed because of their direct toxic effects on people, animals, or plants; and the poisoning of food and water supplies in the course of war. Leaders, organizers, facilitators, conspirators, and accomplices participating in the formulation and execution of these acts are claimed to be responsible for all acts performed by any person in the execution of this plan. The acts described allegedly constitute war crimes in violation of the ATS, TVPA, customary international law, the common law of the United States, the common law of the State of New York, the laws of Vietnam, and international treaties, agreements, conventions and resolutions.

  b. Genocide

  It is contended that the acts against plaintiffs constitute genocide, in violation of customary international law which prohibits the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; or imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Leaders, organizers, facilitators, conspirators and accomplices participating in the formulation and execution of these acts are claimed to be responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such plan.

  c. Crimes Against Humanity

  It is contended that the acts against plaintiffs constitute crimes against humanity in violation of customary international law, which prohibits inhumane acts of a very serious nature such as willful killing and torture and other inhumane acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds. Leaders, organizers, facilitators, conspirators and accomplices participating in the formulation and execution of these acts are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such plan.